Take a break from the routine and let me give you a break from routine abuse.
We all know Jesus wasn’t born this time of year. We all know the Hebrew people gave little emphasis to birthdays in the first place, and the first century churches did not celebrate Jesus’ birth at all. They celebrated His death and resurrection. This whole business of holidays (holy days) is not that the day itself is particularly sacred. It has to do with cycles built into Creation, including the cyclical patterns that affect humans on a moral level.
We are hard-wired to take one day in seven as a break from the routine of daily life. We are hard-wired to take seasonal breaks when nature itself calls out to human souls to stop and notice what the Creator has done and is still doing. We labor under the Fall, living in a world where most of what we think we know is simply false. If we confine ourselves to what we can detect from our intelligence, we know nothing that matters. Periodic breaks from the routine of human capabilities and survival helps us reset our commitments to higher things. The very fact that we notice time and space constraints is the ultimate proof of our fallen nature. Escaping those limits requires that we observe how God wants to use them.
Today is the Sunday before what is essentially a pagan holiday. There is no need to rehash here how Constantine inserted the worship of his preferred deity, Sol, into the church calendar once he suckered the leadership. It’s not harmful to continue tolerating what is now a long-established tradition, so long as we don’t take it too seriously. So in the spirit of this season, I want to share some of the things that I have.
You should not imagine my interest in computers is just a hobby. It began that way two decades ago, but it has become a central mission for me, a major element in my mission calling. It is part of how I express the pastoral gifts of pointing out to people how they can escape this fallen world in one way or another. This is serious business with me, so humor me for a moment.
Yesterday I posted about escaping oppression online. You don’t have to follow me in using Linux, but you won’t understand anything I write if you miss the underlying point: Don’t surrender any more than you must in order to take care of your calling and mission. If it is possible to escape using Windows, full-time at least, you should do so. That’s advice, not a command. It’s what I’ve discovered to be effective in serving Christ.
Let’s talk about web browsers for a minute. Things have changed. My old favorite Opera is obsolete and doesn’t work as well as it once did; it hasn’t kept up with the Net. The newer version is hardly different from Chrome/Chromium. After considerable use and testing, I don’t trust WebKit, the underlying technology for Chrome/Chromium, the new Opera and a dozen others. That includes Slimboat. The WebKit folks are not looking out for the user’s best interests. They are elitist and arrogant, subtly hostile to user requests for features and changes. Some of the underlying controls seem to be obfuscated intentionally to keep users out. Use them with great care and distrust. It’s okay if you can’t take the time to dig into this stuff; you don’t need to hate WebKit, but simply be aware it isn’t in your best interest long term.
The Mozilla stuff is slower and requires more computer power to run, but is more trustworthy. That is, the folks behind the various projects are still much more interested in the user. If you decide to dig into the details, they won’t hide stuff from you. The information is available; the design is simpler and easier to understand. They want you to have as much control as you desire. Firefox requires more work than Seamonkey, but the former is far more popular.
Here’s a trick for those of you running Debian: If you unzip and run each of them from your own home folder, the automated update feature of the browser works cleanly. Recently I found Seamonkey and Firefox updating incrementally instead of requiring that I download the whole package from scratch. Because I retained my user-account ownership over the whole thing resting within my own home folder, both of them had the permission to update individual files directly. Once you unzip and untar the main package, simply push the resulting folder into your home directory as a subfolder and run it from there.
Also for Debian users, if you need something lighter and equally trustworthy, I recommend NetSurf. In previous years it would run some processes in the background all the time, but they’ve fixed that. The settings are simple and the browser will protect you from a lot of crap on the Net. You can set the cache retention time to zero and it won’t keep any stuff once you close the browser. It doesn’t render every site perfectly, but it works most of the places I visit and renders awfully fast. This is what Midori wishes it could be, and never will be, because NetSurf has it’s own internal rendering engine, whereas Midori relies on WebKit. You don’t get animations if you turn them off and adblocking is really good.
If I want to focus and do things quickly, I use Dillo. It’s very minimalist among graphical browsers and renders even less than NetSurf. But if you know the sites you visit well enough, and Dillo can render enough of it, you’ll still get the information you seek. It’s like Lynx with some better formatting and with pictures. Some days I just don’t want to see anything but text and Lynx is it. I’ve gotten used to how it displays things and can be quite comfortable when I really need to read without distractions.
As a final note, I generally don’t like graphical email clients. I use Alpine on my Debian machine. Having tinkered with its predecessor, Pine, quite a bit over the years, I’ve gotten used to the many different configuration options. I have the text rather highly colored and use fixed formatting at 72 characters. I’ve figured out which browsers will or won’t interpret the links I scrape from the XTerm window from Alpine in case I actually want to see something. I wrote up a guide on configuring Alpine for multiple accounts, so it’s easy to do if you need it. I note in passing Debian uses .pine-passfile for password storage.
You need not go to my extremes. I push the limits and mark the path; go where you need to go. If you have questions on securing other software, just ask. Merry Christmas.
